Book 2, Him Her Him Again The End of Him – Patricia Marx

Everyone knows someone like the nameless narrator in former SNL writer Patricia Marx’s Him Her Him Again The End of Him. Our nameless heroine starts an absolutely neurotic twenty-one-year-old college grad student, trying to decide on what the subject of her thesis is. While at Cambridge, she stumbles upon a loquacious cad named Eugene. Everyone has those ludicrously-bad college boyfriends, but no one can top Eugene. He’s possibly one of the most obnoxious fops I’ve ever read: an absolute narcissist incapable of using monosyllabic words, whom is quick to remind everyone around him of his beloved almost-nominated-for-a-Nobel-prize grandfather. Of course, eventually Eugene and the narrator break up, and then her neurosis reaches galactic proportions.

After Eugene dumps our narrator, and casually announces he is marrying another girl, causing our narrator to flee from London back to her home town in the US. She quietly obsesses over her lost love, eventually landing a job on SNL rip-off “Taped but Proud” as a writer; only to have Eugene reappear in her life: sickly wife and child in tow. Eventually they engage in an affair because our narrator refuses to fall out of love with him. Everything is all well and good, until it becomes mind-numbingly clear to the narrator, that she is not Eugene’s only extra-marital conquest. When she finally has the juevos to stand up to this fop, he is instead crushed to death by his own bookshelf.

All in all this is maybe one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, even though the plot synopsis sounds sort of ‘chick-lit’ty. Steve Martin gave it a beaming review (which yes, is sometimes how I pick up books), and well, it’s well deserved. A lot of the humor is about academia. And having been in college for almost a decade, I feel that I can relate to that. All in all, I feel that it’s a solid book, give it a read.